Six Days in Leningrad

PART I

BEFORE: THE TEXAS LIFE

MOVING DAY

Kevin and I got to our brand new house at 8:20 in the morning and not a moment too soon: the moving truck was already parked in front of the driveway. We had to drive on the grass to go around it. We had barely opened the garage doors when the guys started laying down their blankets and getting out their trolleys. The next thing we knew, they were bringing stuff into the house.

Into a house, I might add, that wasn’t quite ready yet. The builder’s cleaning crew had just arrived and were in the kitchen, scrubbing. The movers started piling boxes onto the carpet, which had not been vacuumed since the day it was installed.

I asked the cleaning women to please vacuum the rooms before they continued with their other tasks so that the movers could pile the boxes onto clean carpets. You would have thought I’d asked them to carry heavy objects on their backs upstairs in 100-degree heat. First the diminutive ladies huffed and puffed, and then they said they spoke no Inglés. Phil, my building manager, explained to me that the women worked at their own pace and according to their own schedule. I looked at him as if he were not speaking Inglés and finally responded, Phil, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re moving in. Please ask them to vacuum the floor in the bedroom and living room.

Problem is, Phil said, they don’t speak any English.

My two young sons, Misha, three, and Kevie, one, zigzagged in front of the movers. I think they were trying to trip them. Misha was crying. I don’t want to go to Burger King for breakfast, I don’t want to go to Burger King for breakfast. Natasha, eleven, was reading, perched on top of a box of books, wisely ignoring everyone and everything.

The babysitter cajoled Misha, but in the meantime, Kevie had toddled off to the pool. The dogs were barking non-stop. They wanted either to be let in, let out or shot.

My husband ran in and said, Please go out to the garage and talk to the movers. They need one of us there at all times to tell them where things are going.

But I labeled all the boxes!

Well, they don’t know where boy bedroom is or where guest bedroom is, Kevin replied. Every bedroom looks the same.

The pool guy knocked on the back porch door. Hey, guys? Is this a bad time to show you how to use the pool equipment?

The one-year-old ran in from the pool, draped himself around his father’s leg and wouldn’t let go until Kevin picked him up. The babysitter pried him off eventually. The dogs continued to bark. Misha continued to scream about Burger King. Apparently he didn’t want to go, he really wanted to stay right here at the new house.

Our builder walked in. Well, good morning! We needed just a couple more days with this house, but that’s okay, we’ll make it work. Hey, do you have a few minutes to go over the change orders? I have your closing contract. I need both you and Kevin to sign.

One of the moving guys stuck his head in and said pointedly, "Mrs. Simons, could we see you in the garage right now, please?"

The phone rang.

How could that be? I didn’t think we’d unpacked a phone yet.

Open boxes stood on the kitchen counter.

The front door bell rang. It was the delivery guy from Home Depot. He’d brought the barbecue. Where would I like it?

Another delivery truck stopped in front of the house. This one was unloading a dryer and a television.

Another truck pulled up, with my new office desk. The two desk guys steadfastly refused to take the desk upstairs, because we’re not insured for damage. They asked if the moving guys could do it.

The moving guys said they certainly weren’t insured to move a desk that wasn’t on their truck upstairs. So I told the desk guys that either they took the desk upstairs or else they could take it right back to the warehouse.

They took the desk upstairs.

"Mrs. Simons!"

In the garage, the four large moving guys stood with their arms folded and impatiently told me they were having a problem with the cleaning ladies, who really needed to stay out of their way. "We cannot do our job, Mrs. Simons."

The dogs were still barking. My young sons were now running around in the street as the babysitter chased after them, trying to corral them into the minivan.

Pressing my fingers into my temples, I glanced at my watch. 8:45 a.m.

The phone rang again. It was my father calling from Prague.

Hey, Papa, I said weakly.

Well? he asked. Are you excited?

What?

About our trip. It’s no small thing, you know, you going back to Russia for the first time in twenty-five years. Are you thinking about it?

Absolutely, Papa, I said. I’m thinking about it right now.

My newly-built house in Texas, June 1998.

July 1998.

THE BRONZE HORSEMAN

We had been planning our trip to Russia for a year. Ever since the summer of 1997, when I told my family that my fourth novel, The Bronze Horseman, was going to be a love story set in World War II during the siege of Leningrad. I said I couldn’t write a story so detailed and sprawling without seeing Russia with my own eyes.

My family had listened to me carefully, and then my grandfather said, Plina, I hope I’m not going to be turning over in my grave reading the lies you’re going to write in your book about Russia.

I also hope not, Dedushka, I said. Though you’re not dead. He was only ninety, a spring chicken in his own words.

Going to St. Petersburg was not an option before the summer of 1998. The logistics of the trip had been too overwhelming. How would I get a non-Russian-speaking husband and three non-Russian-speaking kids, one of them barely walking, to Russia? And what would they do there? Either my husband would be watching the kids full-time in a foreign country — and not just any foreign country, but Russia! — or we would be watching them together, and I wouldn’t be doing any research.

I didn’t need to go all the way to Russia to take care of my kids. I could stay home in Texas and do it. Kevin and I considered leaving them and just the two of us going, but in the end decided that was a bad idea. Leave the kids with a babysitter for ten days? Too much: for them, for us.

Still, thoughts of Russia would not go away. Also, there was no book. Eighteen months earlier there had been a nebulous vision of two young lovers walking in deserted Leningrad on the eve of a brutal war, but a vision did not an epic story make. How could I not go to Russia?

I finally said to Kevin that it looked like I would have to go on my own. He didn’t love the idea, my going to a place like Russia by myself. He said I should take my sister.

I ran the idea by my father. Kevin thinks I should take Liza to Russia with me, I said.

My father was quiet on the phone for what seemed like an hour, smoking and thinking. Then he said, "I could come with you."

I hadn’t thought of that.

A girlfriend of mine said, Oh, that’s neat! When was the last time you and your dad took a trip together?

Never.

During the course of a year, the trip gradually took shape. My father told me he was planning to retire from Radio Liberty at the end of May, 1998. We have to go before I retire. My father was the Director of Russian Services for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a government-run radio station where my father worked his entire American life since we left Russia and came to New York in 1973. Working had defined and consumed him. Working was his life. And with good reason. For the last quarter-century, he and his team of writers translated Western news, both political and cultural, into Russian and then broadcast it over shortwave to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. They broadcast to Russia 24/7, with twelve hours of original programming every day. He had been stationed at the New York bureau until 1991 when Communism fell. In 1992 he was made Director of Russian Services, the largest of Radio Liberty’s bureaus and transferred to Munich, and then Prague, where he was at the moment. In my opinion four people were responsible for bringing down the Berlin Wall and Communism: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and my father.

But May was not a good month for me. After much discussion, my father agreed to postpone his retirement and we settled on July, 1998. It was the perfect time to go, my dad told me, because we stood a chance of having some nice weather. Also the nights would be white. That’s a sight to see. You do remember white nights, Plina?

Pfft, of course, Papa. I didn’t want to tell him how little I remembered them. I was just a kid then. In the city, at ten in the evening, I was already asleep.

How long could I be away and not traumatize my kids? I figured a day to travel there, a day to travel back, and then six days in St. Petersburg. But even then, when it was almost finalized, I vacillated, procrastinated, delayed.

Truth was, I didn’t want to go back.

In Vienna, September 1973, in a coat my mother hand-knitted for me.

IN 1973 THERE WERE SHARKS

I was born in St. Petersburg when it was still called Leningrad and came to America when I was ten. We left Leningrad one fall day and lived in Rome while waiting for our entry visa to the United States.

Those were blissful months we spent in Rome. Every Thursday my mother gave me a few lire, enough to go to the movies by myself and buy a bag of potato chips. I’d never eaten anything so delicious in Russia as potato chips. The movies were all in Italian of course, of which I spoke exactly three phrases: bella bambina, bruta bambina and mangiare per favore. Cute baby, ugly baby, and food please. It was two more phrases than I spoke in English.

We spent my tenth birthday in Rome. My parents asked me what I wanted, and I said gum. So I got gum. Also some strawberry gelato, and then we went to the American theater across town to see the 1966 Oscar winner A Man for All Seasons. I liked the gum better than the movie. I didn’t understand a word of it, but at the end, the man for all seasons had his head cut off.

We came to America two days before Thanksgiving 1973. Our first big American meal was turkey and mashed potatoes and something called cranberry jelly. We celebrated in Connecticut, at the home of a young man we had met briefly in Vienna and who’d invited us to his house for the holidays. We gave thanks for our amazing luck, for getting out of Russia, for coming to America. America seemed like heaven. True, first you had to die, to leave behind the only life you knew how to live, but then you had — America! The death was leaving Russia. Because once you left, you could never go back. My father had told me that when we were leaving.

America was life after death.

That Thanksgiving, when everyone else was done with their meal, my father walked around the table and finished the food the Americans had left behind on their plates. My mother was so embarrassed. What are you doing?! But my father calmly explained what we all knew to be true: Russian people of a certain age born in Leningrad do not leave food on their plates.

Our second American meal was the lasagna our landlady brought up to our apartment in Woodside, Queens. Don’t ask me how this is, but during our stay in Rome, Italy, I had not tasted tomato sauce once. I had not had lasagna. I had not had pizza. I did not know tomato sauce until our Italian landlady knocked on our door.

In America there was Juicy Fruit gum, and chocolate ice cream, which I had never had, and corn, which I also had never had, and something called Coca-Cola. And television. I found a children’s cartoon: Looney Tunes. I’d never seen anything like it. In Russia, we had black-and-white war movies, black-and-white news. There was some animated programming, but it looked like war movies, just less interesting.

War movies and news. And the Olympics, which was the single most exciting thing on Soviet television — unfortunately the Olympics came only once every four years.

Suddenly there was Looney Tunes! Bugs Bunny! Elmer Fudd! Porky Pig! Our first TV set was black and white, but the cartoons were straight out of someone else’s Technicolor dream. The war movies in Russia were set in gray tents and invariably starred two gray men who talked non-stop until there was a battle, followed by more dialogue, all concluding in a blaze and eventual victory for Mother Russia. The movies lasted, it seemed to me, as long as the war itself.

In Queens, the Looney Tunes bunny blew up a pig, blew up a hunter, ran away, blew up a cave and fell off a cliff, all in eight minutes. Then he disappeared and was instantly replaced by a lady selling towels made of paper. Towels made of paper? The cartoon was over, so I turned off the TV, utterly disappointed.

It took me many weeks to discover that the cartoon did not end but was merely interrupted by the lady selling towels made of paper. Imagine my happiness!

I used to read in Russia, and who could blame me? What else was there to do? Now that I had Bugs Bunny, all reading stopped for four or five years.

In school I would occasionally be asked to talk to the other students about my experience of life in the Soviet Union. That’s how it was put: "Your experience of life in the Soviet Union." I wanted to say even then that it wasn’t my experience of life, it actually was my life, but I didn’t. Instead, I gave my little talk in broken English: about the communal apartment, the small rooms, the cockroaches falling on my bed while I slept, the bed bugs and the smell like a decomposing skunk they made when I accidentally squished them, about the lack of food, the lack of stores, the lack of my father.

When I was asked, How did it feel living with that kind of deprivation? I would shrug and say, I didn’t know it was deprivation. We all lived the same way. I thought it was just life.

My American friends grew up with Coca-Cola and Jesus Christ.

I grew up with hot black tea and the astronaut Yuri Gagarin — the first man in space.

My husband grew up watching I Dream of Jeannie and Star Trek.

I watched Gagarin’s funeral, and a 120-part series called Liberation — full of burning tents and dark winter nights — which they rebroadcast every December because Decembers near the Arctic Circle weren’t bleak enough.

I’d never seen a palm tree, I’d never seen an ocean, I’d never heard a church service, I’d never read Charlotte’s Web. I read The Three Musketeers, Les Misérables and a Russian writer named Mikhail Zoshchenko. By the time I was ten I had read all of Anton Chekhov and Jules Verne, but what I wanted, though I did not know it, was Nancy Drew and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

What was baseball? What was peanut butter? I didn’t know. I knew what soccer was, what mushroom barley soup was, what perch was.

And who was this Jesus Christ?

I, who had not grown up with Christmas carols, cookies, decorations and a divine baby in a cave, had only a dim understanding of what Jesus had to do with Christmas. My first Christmas Eve in New York my parents went out, leaving me alone to joyfully watch Bonanza — or so I thought. But to my great dismay, Michael Landon (on whom I had quite the crush) was replaced on Channel 11 by a log burning on a fire and instrumental muzak. As you might imagine, my Pavlovian reaction to the discovery that this Christmas was responsible for ousting my Michael Landon was less than spiritually appropriate.

While my husband was vacationing near Lake George, I was learning how to swim in the icy Black Sea.

Kevin knew Atlantic Ocean beaches. I knew the dirty sand on the Gulf of Finland. It had been enough for me when I was a child. I spent ten summers of my life in a tiny Russian fishing village called Shepelevo near the Gulf of Finland. Three months of every year, I slept, read, fished, swam, and played with other kids, from dawn to dusk, free and in bliss.

I didn’t want to go back there.

I lived ten years of my life in a communal apartment, nine families sharing thirteen rooms, two kitchens, two bathrooms.

I didn’t want to go back there.

When I was four, my father was arrested and spent the next five years of his life — and mine — in a Soviet prison, in a Soviet labor camp, in exile.

I lived alone with my silent mother. I was not interested in reliving any part of that.

There was no romanticizing our life in Russia. If it weren’t for my unwritten book, why on earth would I go back?

Papa and his (then) only child. February 1965.

MOLOTOV’S GRANDSON

My father got me a travel visa through Radio Liberty. The already painful Soviet visa process was further complicated by the fact that we were going to stay with my father’s best friend Anatoly, instead of in a hotel like normal, non-suspicious tourists.

Papa, why don’t we stay in a hotel?

What hotel?

I looked in my St. Petersburg guide, and it lists two great hotels in Leningrad —

Don’t call it Leningrad.

Fine. St. Petersburg. Two great hotels: Grand Hotel Europe, and Astoria.

"Astoria is a very nice hotel."

"So it says. It says it’s located conveniently close to the statue of the Bronze Horseman. That’s good for me. As you know, that’s what I’m calling my book The Bronze Horseman."

I want to speak to you about that. I think it’s a terrible title.

I sighed. Papa, it’s a very good title, and everybody likes it.

Who is everybody?

My agent, my editor. My former editor. My husband.

They don’t understand.

Fine. Can we go back to hotels? Astoria is nice?

Yes, but Paullina, I can’t stay in Astoria. I’m retiring in August. And my company won’t pay for such a hotel.

Grand Hotel Europe?

Very nice hotel, in the center of town, close to Nevsky Prospekt. So convenient. He sounded like a travel agent.

So which one is better?

Paullina, we can’t stay in either. We have a perfectly decent apartment to stay in with Anatoly and his wife, Ellie. They loved you very much when you were a child. They can’t wait to see you. Their daughter Alla can’t wait to see you either. You remember her, don’t you?

Of course I remembered her. She had been my best friend.

Anatoly and Ellie have room. You’ll be comfortable. It’ll be fine.

I thought about it. How close are they to the center of town?

Okay fine, their apartment is not the Grand Hotel Europe. It’s not going to be fifty paces from Nevsky Prospekt. They live on the outskirts of town, the last stop on the metro. You do what you like, but I have to stay with them. They’ll never forgive me if I don’t.

I continued to quiz him about the two hotels. My father finally admitted to me that my parents’ wedding reception was held on the top floor of Grand Hotel Europe.

I have to stay there then. There is no question.

He told me that when I was a baby, I had helped him to smuggle strictly forbidden books out of Grand Hotel Europe. He received them from an American friend who was visiting Russia and staying at the hotel. KGB agents checked every bag that left the hotel as a matter of course. They were watching my father particularly carefully because of a provocative letter he had sent to Pravda; he had to be cautious. So when he received the books from his American acquaintance, he put them underneath me in my baby carriage, wrapped the blanket around me and the books, and wheeled us out into the street.

He smuggled out Thirteen Days That Shook the Kremlin: Imre Nagy and the Hungarian Revolution by Tibor Meray, Bitter Harvest: The Intellectual Revolt Behind the Iron Curtain, a collection of essays and stories edited by Edmund Stillman, The New Class by Milovan Djilas, and The Communist Party of the Soviet Union by Leonard Schapiro.

Years later, in 1994, a former KGB agent who used to watch my father met him at a gathering in Munich and asked him, Yuri Lvovich, tell me, that winter night, how did you get those books out of the hotel? We were watching you so carefully.

After my father told him how, the KGB agent shook his head and said, We underestimated you, Yuri Lvovich.

During our next conversation, I said to him, Papa, how about if we stay with Anatoly and Ellie for a few days, but then I will get us a suite at Grand Hotel Europe and we’ll stay there the rest of the time.

How much is a room there? Four hundred dollars a night?

Five hundred.

Oh my goodness.

Don’t worry about it. It will only be for a few nights.

But because I was going to be staying part of the time with friends, I couldn’t get a simple tourist visa. I needed to get a letter of invitation from a business. My father said he would take care of it. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which had bureaus in Prague, Munich, Washington, Moscow and St. Petersburg, would provide me with an invitation.

My father’s colleague in Washington personally walked my visa application over to the Russian embassy to be processed.

The man who is walking with your application, doing you a favor, processing your visa, treat him with respect, my father told me. He is Molotov’s grandson.

Vyacheslav Molotov had been Stalin’s foreign minister, responsible for the war with Germany and the war with Finland, and for unwittingly giving his name to the incendiary cocktails the Finns invented in his honor.

Not Molotov’s grandson!

Yes, my father said, lowering his voice, but don’t say anything to him.

Why? I asked. Doesn’t he know whose grandson he is?

My father said it was a very complicated subject and spoke no more about it. I did think there was something Homeric about Molotov’s grandchild traipsing to the Russian embassy to get me my Russian visa so that I could go to Russia and write about the period when his grandfather had been making history. I sent Molotov’s grandson my three published books, all signed to his wife, and thanked him for helping me. I really wanted to ask him about his grandfather, but didn’t.

GRAND CENTRAL STATION

Grand Central Station wasn’t in New York. It was in my house in Texas.

With barely two weeks between our move and my trip, and having not yet unpacked, I was trying to get some work done before we left. But not only was my mother-in-law visiting from New York for ten days, my builder must have had every contractor in Dallas stopping by my house at least twice a day.

I had made a firm commitment to myself that I would finish reading one of my Russian research books before we left, but that was before Eric, the screen-door guy, came to replace the screen door — twice. The painters hadn’t finished painting before we moved in, and a quarter of the power outlets weren’t working, including the one my computer was supposed to be plugged into. The faucet in the kitchen was leaking. The icemaker upstairs wasn’t making ice, while the frost-free refrigerator was making frost.

The days were too full for me to do my regular work — research, beginning my new novel, plus being a mom to three small kids, all home for the summer — much less prepare to travel to Russia. But every once in a while, my dad would call and say, Are you ready for our trip?

I am, I’d say. But I have to go because the Rotor Rooter guys are at the door. We have an overflow problem in one of our shower drains.

Somehow, a week before I left for Russia, I managed to squeeze in an event at a local bookstore in Dallas for the publication of Eleven Hours, and a live TV interview in Austin, Texas, eight round-trip hours away.

Meanwhile the door latches in the house were nearly all broken, the garage door keypad was not opening the garage, and the concrete driveway was getting dents in it as if it were made of dough not cement.

The front fence was not fully installed, and our dogs kept running out onto the road.

The grass was dying, which could have had something to do with the fact that it had been over a hundred degrees in Dallas every day for the past six weeks and no rain.

In Russia I had read a book about a place Americans called the west, and in this west there were endless prairies and on these prairies rode cowboys with lassos. I didn’t know what a lasso was, but it sure sounded exciting when I was a little girl growing up in Russia. One day, I wanted to see this prairie.

And here I was. We had built our house on the edge of the prairie. Ours was the last lot in the development that ended a few hundred yards past our house. There the prairie began — a savannah that disappeared into the sky. A lone tree. Some bales of hay. The sun rose in the backyard and set in the front yard. Nothing marred our view of the relentless sun or the prairie. Nothing. Dead grass, burnt corn, coyotes, lightning storms. And rats in the pool. Not dead rats either.

Time inched its way toward July 12.

Where the magic happens. Note the drawn blinds to keep out that glorious daylight.

May 1964, at six months. Must have just realised how far I am off the ground.

FLY AEROFLOT!

A few days before our trip, my father instructed me to get a single room at a hotel and forget about a suite for him and me. I will stay with Anatoly, he said. He will never forgive me if I don’t stay with him. You stay by yourself. Getting a single room will be cheaper for you. I will meet you at your hotel every morning and we will go about our business.

I booked the hotel for six days. My father was surprised. He thought I would stay at least a few nights with him at Anatoly’s apartment. But I was thinking of myself. How inconvenient, to pack and unpack twice.

Besides, it was only for six days.

The airfare I booked was one of the cheapest. The travel agent was thrilled when after an hour of looking — while I stayed on the line — she finally found something inexpensive for my exact dates.

What airline is it? I asked.

Aeroflot.

I wasn’t too sure about Aeroflot. When every other airline was quoting me a return fare of twelve hundred to nineteen hundred dollars, what was Aeroflot doing selling me a ticket for five hundred and thirty dollars? They were practically gifting me a seat. I fretted.

Is it standing room only or something?

No, no. It’s their regular fare. They don’t have a lot of these special seats left. And it’s a non-stop flight.

Now I got excited. Other airlines were refueling in Paris or London. Aeroflot did not need to refuel!

Non-stop all the way from Dallas? Wow.

No, no, the woman said hurriedly. Not Dallas. JFK. New York.

I pointed out to her that I did not live in New York. I lived in Texas, and needed a ticket from Dallas.

I don’t have a ticket from Dallas. Well, I do — on Air France, with a three-hour layover in Paris, for $1900.

I remained silent.

Don’t worry, said the travel agent. You can fly Aeroflot. The rest is easy. We just have to find you a connecting flight.

I knew it couldn’t be that simple, and it wasn’t. My Aeroflot flight was leaving New York at 1:15 p.m. on Sunday. My flight from Dallas would not arrive in New York until 11:30 a.m.

Into LaGuardia, twelve miles away from JFK.

Which would give me an hour and forty-five minutes — assuming my first flight was on time — to get my luggage, find a cab, drive across town, and check into an international flight — check-in time for which was strictly three hours before departure.

I’ll take it, I said.

I told Kevin I would pack only a garment bag, as carry-on luggage. How was I going to fit a week’s worth of clothes and shoes into one garment bag?

My father had given me weirdly specific instructions about what time to meet up in St. Petersburg. I was flying from Dallas, while he would be arriving from Prague.

Of course I got it all wrong. Apparently I was arriving too early.

I told you, he said when I gave him my flight details, don’t come before Monday, July 13.

"But Papa, I am coming Monday, July 13."

Yes, but you’re coming in at 5:30 in the morning. I can’t be there that early.

So come when you can and meet me at the hotel.

I could tell he was frustrated, but I couldn’t understand why. Did he want to meet me at the airport?

I can’t be there at five in the morning, he repeated.

I understand, I said. Come when you can. You don’t have to meet me at the airport. I can take a taxi.

Two days later he called again. You won’t take a taxi. I will have a man meet you. Viktor. He will meet you, holding up a sign with your name on it. In Russian. You know how to read your name in Russian, don’t you?

Yes, Papa.

Pay him. Pay him like thirty rubles. Look, and if something happens and he’s not there, then take a taxi. There are plenty of taxis. But make sure you negotiate the fare in advance. Because if you get in and say you’re going to Grand Hotel Europe, they’ll take all your money. Negotiate in advance. If they quote you a hundred rubles, don’t go. If they quote you fifty rubles, talk them down to thirty.

Okay, I said, but I must have sounded hesitant, because my father quickly added, "Viktor will be there. He will be there